


Touch of the Planet

by Skeren



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Gen, Hearing the Planet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-24
Updated: 2016-02-24
Packaged: 2018-05-23 02:13:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6101385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skeren/pseuds/Skeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aeris was glad for the escape Zack gave her... but he had been gone a long time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Touch of the Planet

**Author's Note:**

> Written August 2007.

There were times when, no matter how hard it may have been to pretend that she was just fine, she wanted to crack and fall apart so the harsh summer winds could scatter her across the open wastelands that surrounded Midgar. She’d seen those wastelands, felt them with a vividness that she and she alone had been cursed with. 

When she was young, the tugging pull of the planet’s pain didn’t often visit her. It was an innocence that she sometimes wished she still had, that lack of knowing what humans were capable of. 

But that wasn’t to be. She was, ultimately, her mother’s daughter. Not the woman that she loved as a mother and who raised her. No, it was the creature that ran with her as an infant that shaped who she was, desire for otherwise notwithstanding. She did try, though. She tried her best to tune out the sharpness of the planet, to make a soothing place of her garden to both help her real mother and to ease those nagging whispers.

It wasn’t always a comfort. Sometimes the only comfort came from hiding away from all those things of dust and dirt, accepting a date that drew her further away, even above the plate at times. That was one thing she would always be grateful to Zack for. He gave her an escape from the nagging whispers and the constant evidence of her differences. 

That he was a good man only helped, calmed the fears of her mother, shielded her from the sometimes too close gaze of Shinra. It was ironic that someone so willingly tied to Shinra was the buffer that kept them away from her, ultimately, in the most effective manner. Zack was unpredictable. Zack came and went as he could, and his missions were often secret enough that those who spied on her didn’t care to get caught up in a cycle of misinformation. 

She was grateful he’d crashed in on her that day. It was one of those rare days where she had been thankful of her differences. It was a day where she’d been able to help someone grievously wounded. It was a day where she gained a protector who never knew how close he’d come to being so much more hurt than he was. Physically at least. 

It was, also, a day she sometimes regretted. He had been gone a long time now, having left on another of those unpredictable missions, and she realized that somewhere between that crash landing and the day he left her, she’d come to love him. She’d come to love him more than anyone else, her mother being possibly the only exception, and the planet was aware. 

The planet had reached for her more and more, added to and expanded the ache, tried to fill her melancholy up with unnatural pain that no one small creature was ever meant to deal with. She hadn’t liked it. In fact, she had become ever more active, going around people more and more, selling her flowers in crowded places as she tried to use them as a barrier to the sensations of the planet. 

It was always more likely to strike at her when she was alone.

The ache had gone quiet, worryingly so, for the past few days, and now... there was another man that had fallen through her roof. She’d turned her attention from tending the flowers to tending him, taking in the way his hair fluffed and the fine quality of his features. 

He almost looked like he could be a negative of her Zack, delicate where Zack had been bold, and just as beautiful. In a way, his arrival terrified her.

She hated to think that she could characterize the chapter of her life with Zack as closed... but what else could she do? This person was her dear SOLDIER’s antithesis, pale, small, though that was more a personal perception than a reality, on second thought. Even still, it did not sit right with her that she was once again in this position. 

Did she really need another protector? Did she need someone to finally replace her Zack? 

If she did... well. If she did, then she would just have to see if this man was just as unlike her Zack as he looked. If he was, it would make this all so much simpler...

But she had to wake him up first. And then she would know.

Once she knew, she would know what to do when the planet finally put its pressure on her again, and she might, at last, have some of the answers she needed.

Or, she could be cursing herself to be heartbroken all over again.

It made her hesitate, the risk, but she knew she couldn’t let him stay laying there unconscious in her flowers. She just wasn’t that kind of person, at least not to someone who hadn’t done anything wrong aside from a little accidental property damage. 

Glancing up through the holes in her roof, she then cast her eyes back down to him. Just a little property damage, a little startlement, a bit of melancholy. 

“Hello?”

That was all it took, apparently, to tug on a girl’s heartstrings these days.

She hoped that Fate’s eyes weren’t blue, because if they were, then she’d just doomed herself


End file.
